Jordan Bardella’s journey from university dropout to potential prime minister has surprised many, demonstrating a successful political storytelling campaign orchestrated by the far right.
With Jordan Bardella as its figurehead, France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party inflicted a crushing defeat on President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance, winning twice as many votes in the European elections in June.
This significant defeat led the president to take a surprising decision by calling early legislative elections, scheduled for June 30 and July 7.
Born in 1995 in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris, in a council estate, to a single mother, the young political prodigy presents himself as a survivor of a difficult suburb, gangrened by drugs and radical Islam.
“Like many families who live in these neighborhoods, I was confronted with violence, seeing that my mother could not make ends meet”he said in an interview with France 2 in April.
The reality, however, is much more nuanced.
The self-made man narrative called into question
Jordan Bardella’s childhood was split between his mother’s apartment and his father’s house in the much more affluent town of Montmorency, a northern suburb of Paris.
His father, who ran a drinks distribution business and was relatively well-off, has been erased from Bardella’s history, said Pierre-Stéphane Fort, an investigative journalist who recently published an unauthorized biography of the young politician.
“Bardella attended mostly Catholic private schools. When he was a teenager, his father took him on a long trip to the United States. When he was 19, his father bought him a Smart car. When he was 20, he gave him to his son an apartment in a wealthy Parisian suburb of Val d’Oise But all this did not fit into the political storytelling.Mr Fort told Euronews.
A recent investigation by Le Monde tried to find traces of the young Bardella in the Saint-Denis district, which became central to his narrative as a “self-made man”, but did not find much.
Few residents remember seeing Bardella in the neighborhood, and the few who do don’t recall whether he had a particular interest in politics or the far right.
Bardella’s involvement in politics began at the age of 16, when the young man joined the National Rally (known at the time as the National Front).
Even then, Bardella sported his characteristic clean look. He went to political meetings in a suit, with slicked-back hair, seeking to embody the de-demonization initiated by Marine Le Pen, to rid himself of the xenophobic and anti-Semitic past of the RN.
“Bardella understood very early on that to climb the ladder he had to be irreproachable”said the biographer, referring to interviews with other party members who knew Jordan Bardella early in his career.
A few years later, the young man dropped out of university to join the party full time.
He was successively regional advisor, spokesperson and vice-president of the party before leading the National Rally list in the 2019 European elections, at just 23 years old.
In November 2022, he was elected successor to Marine Le Pen as president of the far-right party.
He is currently a Member of the European Parliament and is tipped to become Prime Minister of France if his party wins an absolute majority in the next legislative elections.
According to Mr. Fort, Mr. Bardella’s meteoric rise has a lot to do with his romantic relationship with the daughter of a former RN advisor, Frederick Châtillon, the former president of the Union Defense Group (GUD), a student organization. far-right movement dissolved by the government on Wednesday.
His priority: his public image
Jordan Bardella is the first person who is not a member of the Le Pen family to lead the National Rally.
Marine Le Pen, who came second in the last two presidential elections, remained head of the RN group in the National Assembly and is expected to run again in 2027.
But his young successor, who has more than a million followers on TikTok, is proving to be a major asset in attracting a younger crowd to vote for the party.
Jordan Bardella has cultivated his personality in the media, with appearances on television, and has proven himself adept on social media platforms, where he uses techniques such as trending music, sound effects and video clips. hoc, which have proven to be fertile ground for attracting young voters.
But his critics accuse him of spending too much time cultivating his public image at the expense of crucial political issues.
Left-wing MEP Manon Aubry called him a “ghost parliamentarian”, citing his frequent absences from the European Parliament over the past five years.
This echoes the observations of Mr Fort, who describes Mr Bardella as a chameleon.
“He changes his mind very often and is capable, for example, of saying right but going left.”said the journalist.
“When he speaks to young people, he is a kind of champion of women’s rights, who wants to fight against global warming. He understands that these are important issues for young people. But when you look at his votes in the European Parliament, you realize that he does the opposite of what he says on social networks. For example, on several occasions, he refused to condemn the abortion ban in Poland.”explains the journalist.
More at the end, “The real boss remains Marine Le Pen, not Jordan Bardella”recalls Pierre-Stéphane Fort.
